My title pretty much says it all. I have never understood why programmers/hackers have never used the Firewire to network the PS2 to a PC? Not sure if there is a speed limitation on the PS2, but Firewire is almost USB 2.0 fast. Any insights?
Are you referring to the Sony engineers/developers or the homebrew developers? The homebrew SDK never had a working i.Link driver until just last year, while Sony seemed to have used the i.Link port for that purpose before. The hardware is amazing though: Its DMAC is very smart and does everything the DEV9 expansion interface needs (Mainly support for chained/tagged DMA transfers, as well for irregular block sizes)... but the FIFOs of the i.Link interface may have a problem with having mandatory byteswapping. If it's not actually mandatory, then control for disabling that behaviour just hasn't been found. But one of the SNSYS presentations supports the notion that it might have been an actual hardware design fault because it said that the SNSYS debugging setup they were presenting on used a proprietary i.Link driver which offered a tranfer rate of about 10MB/s. 10MB/s is not possible without DMA, but the i.Link port can give about 50MB/s alone with DMA. When you get the IOP to byte-swap the data (To correct the byteswapping issue) before the DMA channel sends it to the i.Link hardware, it goes down to about 8MB/s. Without DMA (Like in the Sony i.Link driver which was bundled in all games that support the i.Link port), it gives only about 2 to 4MB/s, and it also sucks the soul out of the IOP (Everything runs slower and the power button may not respond well).
I always wanted to see firewire/iLink integration added to uLE alongside USB. It would make transfers a lot faster than usb1.1.. i know Sony removed the port from later models, but there are still plenty of early PS2s about...
Ya, I had meant homebrew developers. Thank you very much for your explanation. It would be cool if someone figures it out, wish I had the enough knowledge & skill for doing that sort of stuff.
Yeah it was call Proview. Paradox released a cracked version for homebrew purposes. I tried it a few times, it does work very quickly. http://www.snsys.com/playstation2/proview.asp
